eLearning Guild Research: Do I Need to Know about HTML5?

“The move from Flash to HTML5 is certainly shaking up the eLearning world in a big way, but Unrein’s report shows that there are actually quite a few advantages to this shake-up.”

One of the undisputed facts about
working in the eLearning field is that there’s a lot to learn, and what there
is to learn changes constantly. That certainly causes some frustration for
people in our field, as a recent eLearning survey showed. We’re putting the
final touches on the What’s Changing in
Your (Work) World research report, which analyzes 674 responses to a survey
taken at the end of June and beginning of July 2012 that evaluated how the
learning and eLearning work world has been changing in the last five years. The
survey had many fascinating results, but one of the most interesting was
answers to the following question:

Compared to five years ago,
has the typical variety of your work tasks increased or decreased? (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Variety of work tasks compared to five years ago
(source: The eLearning Guild, What’s
Changing in Your (Work) World research
report, in press)

The response to this question clearly showed that respondents saw an increase in the variety of
work tasks over the last five years. Almost 71 percent answered either “Much
greater” or “Greater.” Very few said “The same.” Less than 15 percent said “Less”
or “Much less.” This means that almost
all respondents agree that our jobs have increased in variety of work tasks.

Is this a problem? There has been a great deal of discussion
on online boards and elsewhere about the increasing need to know about
everything and anything when working in the eLearning world and how hard it is
to meet that expectation.

One of the primary reasons for
knowing about HTML5 is that Flash isn’t supported on most mobile devices. And
mobile learning or mLearning is becoming a very big trend indeed.

Figure 2 shows a chart from The eLearning
Guild’s 2012 Mobile Learning, The Time Is Now report, showing the large rise in mLearning plans by Guild members from 2009 to 2012. Clearly, mLearning is becoming increasingly
important.

Figure 2: mLearning Plans by
Year, 2009 to 2012 (source: The eLearning Guild, Mobile Learning, The Time is Now research report)

As Judy explains in the HTML5 research
report:

Apple has never supported Flash playback
on their very popular iOS devices (at first, the iPhone and iPod Touch, both
released in 2007). This was problematic for two main reasons: First, most of
the video served on the Internet at that time was Flash-based video. Second,
Flash powered much of the animated content, from games to banner ads to
eLearning content. All of this Flash content required the use of the Flash
Player plug-in, which was extremely prevalent on desktop computers but was not
(and still is not) supported on iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system.

Cut to now. The iPad is still by far the
most popular tablet on the market; iPads comprised about two-thirds of tablet
sales in 2011 (Gartner). Dig a little deeper into mobile statistics, though,
and you’ll find another interesting data point: even though iPads have “only”
66 percent of the tablet market, a greatly disproportionate amount of the web
browsing done on tablets is on iPads—over 90 percent, by some measures
(Albanesius). In addition, iPad users buy more apps and pay more for them per
app (Elmer-DeWitt). This data seems to make it clear that while you may create
for a variety of platforms, at the very least you shouldn’t ignore the portion
of your audience that uses iPads, as this market actively uses its devices.

There’s another fact, though, that
broadens the concerns with delivering content in Flash for mobile and tablet
content consumption. While Android devices have historically supported Flash
content (or at least Flash Mobile, a “light” version of Flash playback that
Adobe created for tablets and mobile devices), Adobe announced in November 2011
that it was halting further development of Flash Mobile (Stevens). Then they
announced in June 2012 that they were no longer supporting Flash Mobile or
certifying it for use on new versions of Android (Fingas). Clearly the writing
is on the wall for the future of Flash playback on tablets and mobile devices.

The move from Flash to HTML5 is certainly shaking up the eLearning world in a big way, but Unrein’s report
shows that there are actually quite a few advantages to this shake-up. For
example, she cites the following among some of the advantages:

Accessibility: “HTML
content is more accessible, even when you make no special effort to develop for
accessibility.”

Editing: “When
content resides in a plug-in, it is difficult if not impossible to open it up,
make edits, and repackage it. Content delivered as HTML is far easier to edit
as needed…”

Search: “In a
world of increasing reliance on search and increasing focus on easily finding
just-in-time content, HTML5 content has a clear advantage over content that
lives within a plug-in.”

Translation: “(You)
can more easily translate content that exists within website code, even if you’ve
made no effort to localize your content.”

Responsive Design:
“Designing with HTML5, you are able to flow content to a certain width or have
it reflow wider or narrower based on the browser size. Responsive design is a
new term coined to describe customizing your content delivery based on the size
of the browser window… This isn’t an automatic feature of HTML, but something
you enable using code instead of plug-in-based content.”

In the rest of her report, Unrein discusses more of HTML5’s
capabilities, how you can use it for eLearning, considerations
for moving to HTML5, including delivery, development, and design, and whether
you should be moving to HTML5. It
also offers some case studies to help you think through what others have done.

My What’s Changing in Your (Work) Worldresearch report will be available soon, so make sure you are a
paid Guild member so you can download both it and the HTML5 report! If you have
any questions or comments about Guild research reports, don’t hesitate to
contact me at pshank@elearningguild.com.

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